[BITList] Car radio-history
FA
franka at iinet.net.au
Thu Jan 30 23:04:11 GMT 2014
*HISTORY OF*
*THE CAR RADIO*
*Seems like cars have always had radios,*
*but they didn't.*
*Here's the story:
*
*One evening, in 1929,*
*two young men named*
*William Lear and Elmer Wavering
drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the*
*Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch
the sunset.*
*It was a romantic night to be sure,*
*but one of the women observed that
it would be even nicer if they could listen to music in
the car.*
*Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered
with radios (Lear served as a radio operator in*
*the U.S. Navy during World War I)*
*and it wasn't long before they were
taking apart a home radio and*
*trying to get it to work in a car.*
*But it wasn't easy: automobiles have ignition switches,
generators, spark plugs, and other electrical*
*equipment that generate noisy static
interference,making it nearly impossible to listen to
the radio when the engine was running.*
*One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated
each source of electrical interference.When they finally
got their radio to work, they took it to a radio convention*
*in Chicago.*
*There they met Paul Galvin, owner of
Galvin Manufacturing Corporation.*
*He made a product called a*
*"battery eliminator", a device that allowed
battery-powered radios to*
*run on household AC current.*
*But as more homes were wired for electricity, more
radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios.*
*Galvin** needed a new product to manufacture. When he
met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention,*
*he found it.He believed that
mass-produced, affordable car*
*radios had the potential to become*
*a huge business.
**
**Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and
when they perfected their first radio, they installed it
in his Studebaker.*
*Then Galvin went to a local banker*
*to apply for a loan. Thinking it*
*might sweeten the deal,*
*he had his men install a radio in*
*the banker's Packard.*
*Good idea, but it didn't work --*
*Half an hour after the installation,*
*the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get
the loan.)*
*Galvin** didn't give up.*
*He drove his Studebaker nearly*
*800 miles to Atlantic City to show*
*off the radio at the*
*1930 Radio Manufacturers*
*Association convention.*
*Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside
the convention hall and cranked up the radio so that
passing conventioneers could hear it.*
*That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the
radio into production.*
*
**_WHAT'S IN A NAME_*
*That first production model was*
*called the 5T71.*
*Galvin** decided he needed to come up with something a
little catchier.*
*In those days many companies in the phonograph and
radio businesses used the suffix "ola" for their names -
/Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola/*
*were three of the biggest.*
*Galvin** decided to do the same thing, and since his
radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he
decided to call it the/_Motorola_./*
*But even with the name change,*
*the radio still had problems:*
*When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110
uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new
car for $650, and the country was sliding into the Great
Depression.*
*(By that measure, a radio for a new car would cost
about $3,000 today.)*
*In 1930, it took two men several days*
*to put in a car radio --*
*The dashboard had to be taken*
*apart so that the receiver and a*
*single speaker could be installed,*
*and the ceiling had to be cut open*
*to install the antenna.*
*These early radios ran on their own batteries, not on
the car battery,*
*so holes had to be cut into the floorboard to
accommodate them.*
*The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and
28 pages of instructions. Selling complicated car
radios that cost 20 percent of the*
*price of a brand-new car wouldn't*
*have been easy in the best of
times, let alone during the Great Depression --*
*
**Galvin** lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple
of years after that. But things picked up in 1933 when
Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the
factory.*
*In 1934 they got another boost when
Galvin struck a deal with*
*B.F. Goodrich tire company
to sell and install them in its chain*
*of tire stores.*
*By then the price of the radio, with installation
included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was
off and running.*
*(The name of the company would be officially changed from*
*Galvin** Manufacturing to*
*"Motorola" in 1947.)*
*In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses
for car radios.*
*In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button
tuning,*
*it also introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a
standard car radio that was factory preset to a single
frequency to pick up police broadcasts.*
*In 1940 he developed the first*
*handheld two-way radio*
*-- The Handy-Talkie --*
*for the U. S. Army.
**
**A lot of the communications
technologies that we take for granted today were born in
Motorola labs in the years that followed World War II.*
*In 1947 they came out with the first television
forunder $200.*
*In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager;
in 1969 came the radio and television equipment that was
used to televise Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon.*
*In 1973 it invented the world's first handheld cellular
phone.*
*Today Motorola is one of the largest cell phone
manufacturers in the world.*
*And it all started with the car radio.*
*
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO*
*the two men who installed the first radio in Paul
Galvin's car?*
*Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very
different
paths in life.*
*Wavering stayed with Motorola.*
*In the 1950's he helped change the automobile
experience again when*
*he developed the first automotive
alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable
generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power
windows, power seats, and, eventually,
air-conditioning.
**
**Lear also continued inventing.*
*He holds more than 150 patents. Remember eight-track
tape players? Lear invented that.*
*But what he's really famous for are*
*his contributions to the field of aviation. He invented
radio direction finders for planes, aided in the
invention of the autopilot,*
*designed the first fully automatic
aircraft landing system,*
*and in 1963 introduced his
most famous invention of all,*
*the Lear Jet,*
*the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet.*
*(Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the
eighth grade.)*
*
**/Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the/*
*/many things that we take for granted actually/*
*/came into being!/*
*AND*
*/It all started with a woman's suggestion!!/*
-
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